My Apocalypse System Built an Empire in the Wasteland

The cold had stopped hurting almost hour ago. That was how I knew I was dying.

At first it had been needles, thousands of them, driving through my gloves and my boots and the three sweaters I had layered under a coat . Then it had been a dull heavy ache, like my bones were being filled with wet cement. Now there was nothing. Just a strange, floating warmth feeling that made me want to lie down in the snow and sleep.

I knew better than that.

So I kept moving, if you could call it moving. I dragged my left leg behind me through the snow that reached my thighs, my breath freezing into white crystals on the scarf over my mouth. Around me, the city I had lived in my whole life was a graveyard of white mounds. Cars. Bus shelters. The second floors of apartment buildings, because the first floors were buried. The sky was the color of old rusted steel, and the wind screamed down the empty.

Keep going, Abbie.

Three days. It had been three days since they left me.

I could still see the truck's taillights if I closed my eyes, two red smears shrinking into the whiteout. But that was not the image that came for me most often.

Three years with Garrett. Three years of his toothbrush next to mine, his jacket on my chair, his voice in the dark telling me I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And Dana, my best friend since we were twelve years old, since friendship bracelets and secrets we whispered under our blankets.

When the first storms hit, I had opened my apartment to both of them. I had said, You're not going anywhere. We'll do this together.

I gave them my blankets. I gave them my food, and went to bed hungry so Garrett could have seconds. When the heat died and the rest of the building emptied out, I was the one who sealed the windows with duct tape and found a camp stove and scavenged firewood from abandoned apartments. When Dana's cough turned wet and rattling, I sold my grandmother's ring, the only thing of hers I had left, to a man in a parking garage who traded in medicine. Six antibiotic tablets. Garrett had held that ring once and told me he would replace it someday with a better one.

I was so proud of myself, climbing the stairs that night with the pills tucked inside my glove. My leg was already swollen from a fall on the ice, but I was thinking, Dana will be okay. We're going to be okay.

That was when I heard the laughter through our door.

Dana's laugh. Bright and Easy. Not the laugh of a woman who couldn't breathe.

"You should have seen her face when I said the ring would be worth something someday," Garrett said. "She actually looked grateful."

"Stop," Dana giggled. Then, softer"You're awful."

Then the sound of a kissing.

I stood in the dark stairwell with my hand on the doorknob, and the whole world tilted.

"Eight months," Dana murmured. "Eight months of her tucking me in and calling me her sister. Sometimes I think I should feel guilty."

"Do you?"

A pause, then a sigh. "No."

I don't remember opening the door. I remember the lamp, and my mother's quilt, the one she had sewn by hand, pulled up around two people on my couch. I remember Dana sitting up, flushed and unashamed, and Garrett not even bothering to let go of her.

"How long?" My voice was that of a stranger's.

"Don't make this a scene, Abbie," Garrett said, with the patience of a man talking to a difficult child.

"How long?"

"Since before the snow," Dana said. not bothering to look away. "Does any of it matter now?"

I held out the pills. I do not know why. Some broken, loyal part of me still wanted her to live.

Dana took them. She did not thank me.

Then Garrett stood, and I realized that while I was falling apart, he had already packed. Crates stood stacked by the door, my crates, my rice and beans and the last jars of peanut butter, my fuel canisters, my water filter. My mother's quilt went into his arms last.

"We found a shelter," he said. "A real one. There's only room for two."

"That's my food."

"It's our food. You'd only waste it on strays and sick people." He hefted a crate. "You'll be fine. You're strong. You always land on your feet."

I grabbed the edge of the crate. I had nothing left, and still I grabbed it. He shoved me, one clean, careless push, and my bad leg gave out, and I hit the floorboards with a thud.

Dana crouched beside me, almost tender, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. My mother used to do that.

"You never ask for anything, Abbie," she whispered. "That's why it's so easy to take."

They left the door open behind them.

Two days later, the roof of my building collapsed under the weight of the snow, and I crawled out through the wreckage with nothing but the clothes I wore.

Now I fell.

I had not meant to. My leg simply stopped listening, and the snow rushed up to meet me, soft as a pillow. I lay with my cheek against it, watching my breath fog and fade.

The warmth was spreading. It felt almost kind.

I thought about my mother's kitchen. The smell of ginger and scallions. The way she used to say, You have too soft a heart, Abbie. The world will eat you alive.

I had laughed at her. I had said that was exactly why the world needed people like me.

Mama, I thought. You were right.

Something crunched behind me. Slowly, dragging footsteps. A wet, rattling breath that was not quite a breath. I had heard that sound in the dark for weeks, and I knew what it meant, and I knew it no longer mattered.

I did not have the strength to roll over. I did not have the strength to be afraid.

I wished I could feel rage. They deserved it. But the anger was too far away.

What I felt instead was a heavy, exhausted grief, and beneath it, one clear, cold thought that cut through the fog like a blade.

I had not died because the world was cruel. The world was always going to be cruel. I was dying because I had handed my life to two people who valued their own more, and I had called it love.

I had never once asked what I was worth.

The footsteps stopped beside me. A shadow fell across the snow, tall and wrong-shaped, swaying. The smell reached me, rotten flesh, Zombies. Whatever came next, I would not feel it. The cold had been merciful about that, at least.

My fingers curled in the snow. I tried to speak, a prayer, a curse, my mother's name, but my lips had gone numb.

So I said it in my head instead, with everything I had left.

If I could do it again. Just once. I would never be weak again. I would never give my life away again. I would take back everything they took from me, and I would build something so strong that no one could ever leave me on the floor.

Please.

The shadow bent over me.

The wind stopped. The screaming stopped. For one strange, silent second, the whole frozen world held its breath.

And then, from somewhere far away and very close, a voice said:

[Condition met. Soul fragment recovered.]

[Rewinding...]

Then black filled my vision.